My.45 lies somewhere in the clouded water, my boots are locked in mud. I hear Doo-Doo firing, but it makes no difference at this point. I stare at my executioner, my body painted with the tropical stink of his country, an unformed prayer wheezing like sand from my throat. The short, fat barrel of the grenade launcher recoils upward in his hands with a deep-throated roar, and a moment later I'm caught in an envelope of flame and I feel a pain in my chest like jagged iron twisting its way through tendon and bone.

Then I am on all fours, like a dog, vomiting blood on my hands, and in the smoke and the smell of burnt powder I stare up the embankment at where the small men in pajamas should be but are not. Instead, Jimmie Lee Boggs takes his package of Lucky Strikes from his blue jeans pocket and lights one. His mannequinlike head is perfectly still as he puffs on his cigarette and lets the smoke drift from his lips. Then he flips the butt in an arc out on the coulee, works his way down the embankment, and finds my.45 in the water.

He works the receiver and knocks the barrel clean of mud on his jeans. He casually points it behind my ear, lets the iron sight bite into my scalp.

"You thought the zips were going to get you, but I'm the one can make you cry," he says.

I woke up with the sheets twisted across my chest, my body hot in the cold square of moonlight that shone through the window. Outside, the pecan trees were black against the sky. I lay awake until dawn, when the light became gray, then pink, in the flooded cypress on the far side of the bayou. Then I tried to sleep again, but it was no use. I helped Batist open up the bait shop, and at eight o'clock I drove to work at the sheriff's office and began processing traffic accident reports, my eyes weak with fatigue.

That afternoon, four days after Tante Lemon and Dorothea's visit, I drove to Minos Dautrieve's house in Lafayette. He lived in the old part of town on the north side, a neighborhood of Victorian homes, deep lawns, enormous live oak trees, iron tethering posts, gazebos, screened galleries, and cascading leaves. He had grown up in a shotgun farmhouse outside of Abbeville, but I always suspected that inside his cynicism he had a jaded reverence for the ways of late-nineteenth-century southern gentility.

We sat on cushioned wood lawn chairs in his backyard and drank lemonade amid the golden light and the leaves that scratched across the flagstones, or floated in an old stone well that he had turned into a goldfish pond.

"You already talked to the sheriff?" he asked.

"He says it's between me and you. I'll be on lend-lease to the Presidential Task Force, but my salary will still come from the department. Evidently everybody thinks this task force is big stuff right now."

"You're not impressed?"

"Who cares what I think?"

"Come on, you don't believe we're winning the war on drugs?" He was smiling. He had to squint against the yellow orb of sun that shone through the oak limbs overhead.

"The head of the DEA says the contras deal cocaine. Reagan and the Congress give them guns and money. It's hard to put all that in the same basket and be serious about it," I said.

He stopped smiling.

"But there's one difference," he said. "No matter what those guys in Washington do, we still send the lowlifes up the road and we trash their operation everywhere we can."

"All right."

"I'm not making my point very well,, though."

"Yes, you are. Look, I respect your agency, I appreciate its problems."

"Respect's not enough. When you work for the federal government, you have to obey its rules. There's no area there for negotiation."

"This whole business was your idea, Minos."

"It's a good idea, too. But let's look at your odometer again. Sometimes you've had a way of doing things on your own."

"Maybe that's a matter of perception."

"You remember that guy you busted with a pool cue in Breaux Bridge? They had to use a mop to clean up the blood. And the guy you cut in half through an attic floor in New Orleans? I won't mention a couple of other incidents."

"I never dealt the play. You know that."

"I can see you've had a lot of regret about it, too."

"I'm just not interested in the past anymore."

"There are some people who aren't as confident in you as I am."

"Then let them do it."

He smiled again.

"That happens to be what I told them," he said. "It didn't light up the room with goodwill. But seriously, Dave, we can't have Wyatt Earp on the payroll."

"You're the skipper. If I do something that causes problems for your office, you cut me loose. What's the big deal?"

"You know, I think you have another potential. Maybe in scholarship. Like reducing the encyclopedia to a simple declarative sentence."

I set my empty glass on a table. The wafer of sun was low in the sky now, the air cooler, the leaves in the goldfish pond dark and sodden. A neighbor was barbecuing, and smoke drifted over the garden wall into the yard. I leaned forward in the chair, one hand pinched around my wrist.

"I think your concern is misplaced," I said. "When I got hurt the second time in Vietnam, it was a million-dollar wound. I was out of it. I didn't have to prove anything, because there was no place to prove it. This one's different. It's ongoing, and I don't know if I'll measure up. I don't know if you have the right man."

I saw his eyes move over my face.

"You're going to do fine," he said.

I didn't answer.

"Like I said, it's not much more complicated than a simple sting," he continued. "We take it a step at a time and see where it leads. If it starts to get nasty, we pull you out. That has nothing to do with you. We don't want any of our people hurt. It's not worth it. We figure the shitbags all take a fall sooner or later.

"Look, this is the way it's going to work. We've got an apartment for you on Ursulines in the Quarter, and the word's going to be out on the street that you're fired and dirty. There are five or six dealers around there you can approach to make a buy. Nothing real big right now, four or five keys, maybe a fifty-thousand-dollar buy. They're not going to trust you. They'll jerk you around, give you a lot of bullshit probably, maybe test you in some way. But these are low-level, greedy guys who are also dumb, and they get a hard-on when they see money. You set up the score, we let it go through, then we move up to bigger things."

"Where's all this money coming from?"

"It's confiscated from drug deals. Don't worry, we'll get it back. Anyway, once these guys are convinced you're the real article, you tell them you want to rein-vest your profits. Then we offer them some serious gelt. They don't want the action, you tell them you can make the score in Houston. Tony Cardo hates the guy who runs the action out of Houston. The word is he screwed Tony's wife in a bathroom stall at the Castaways in Miami. We're talking about a real class bunch here. The goal, though, is to get Cardo involved in the deal. He's a weird fucking guy."

I had to laugh.

"What's your idea of normal?" I asked.

"No, this guy's special. He not only looks weird, he's deeply fucked up in the head. Maybe it's his background. His mother used to shampoo corpses for funeral homes."

"What?"

"That's how she made her money. She washed the hair of corpses for a mortician. Finally she bought her own funeral parlor in Algiers. Tony C. must not have liked it, though, because he put it up for sale two days after he inherited it."

"What if I run across Jimmie Lee Boggs?"

"You let us handle him. We'll figure out a way to have him picked up without compromising you."

"There's one other thing. Tee Beau Latiolais, the black kid who escaped with Boggs, he's in New Orleans. He told his girlfriend he's going to try to find Boggs for me."